In the past, artists were often able to sign on while they forged early careers. Such safety nets have disappeared…

As one person put it at the recent Devoted and Disgruntled event exploring how to engage with the current Tory government: “It now feels as if you are an emerging artist for ever. It’s hard to see the next rung in the ladder.” While in the distant past, a generation of artists were often able to sign on while they forged early careers, such safety nets have disappeared. Artists increasingly have to support themselves in other ways well into their 30s and beyond. No wonder so many give up.

Just because you are doing a job you love, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be properly paid for it. Equity’s Professionally Made, Professionally Paid campaign is reminding employers that actors are not following a hobby but trying to make a career. But the problem extends beyond actors. Salaried staff working in buildings often put in many hours above their contracted schedules.

Although Arts Council England quite rightly demands that those seeking project funding set out budgets that demonstrate how everyone will be paid, what it doesn’t take account of is the hidden subsidy of free labour that goes into making the application in the first place and then administering the project. If the real costs were factored in, the budget might well have to be three or four times higher. But if that was the case, there would be significantly less money to go round which would lead to less work being staged.

That sounds like a good idea, but as another participant at Devoted and Disgruntled said, when he took the decision to no longer work for free he felt that it impacted adversely on his creativity because he was making less work. So if there is less work being commissioned, and higher fees but fewer slots, where does that leave those in the very early stages of their careers, who are hanging on to that first rung of the ladder by their fingertips?

At certain stages in their careers, some may see subsidising their own work through free labour as a sacrifice worth making if they can afford to do so and believe it may bring significant opportunity. But it is exploitation if somebody else is making a profit when they could afford to pay, and if your free work is denying someone else paid employment.

Artist-led projects such as Forest fringe and Buzzcut offer a different model. Artists are not paid, but neither is anyone else. Everyone is looked after and supported and these outfits attract significant interest from promoters and producers. Forest fringe and Buzzcut operate on a gift-style economy, and it’s one that may work elsewhere, particularly if – as Phelim McDermott suggested during Devoted and Disgruntled – there is some way of recognising or banking these gifts in kind. Somebody called it a theatrical-style Nectar card.

What a great many artists are doing is cross-subsidising their work: operating on low or no pay in the UK but commanding decent fees for doing exactly the same projects abroad. There is an undoubted absurdity in the funding system that means brilliant companies such as 1927 simply could not sustain themselves and their projects on the commissioning fees that they might command in the UK and have to look abroad to make work of scale and ambition.

But for many, the success of a company such as 1927 – who are at the Edinburgh festival this August with The Magic Flute and are touring Golem across the world – is a very long way from their current situation, where years of working for no or low pay and being exploited appear to be the only future.